First iOS 9 Sneak peek comes in the form of a very likable concept

Administrator

06:46, December 29, 2014

If you’re curious to know what iOS 9 will look like, you can either wait for a few more months until someone eventually leaks a screenshot, or you can take Yasser Farahi’s word for it that it will look like this.

The image above has been extracted from one of the guy’s tweets. He threw it in just minutes ago, housed by an army of hasthags in what seems to be an attempt for massive discoverability. Whether or not he’s going about it the right way, we don’t mind lending a helping hand.

Farahi is a motion / graphic & concept designer. He works with Ovalpicture, a Dutch freelance design studio. His latest work looks like a real photograph taken during the testing of a redesigned iOS. Farahi believes Apple will forego the squares with rounded corners in favor of circles, something that may or may not happen, depending on how much Apple wants to differentiate itself from competitors’ products.

While Android smartphones don’t necessarily have a standard icon shape for apps, social platforms like Google+ and even Facebook (Messenger) do. Both platforms use circles for icons and avatar pictures, and they’ve become somewhat representative of their services. Since Google is one of Apple’s biggest rivals, the company may feel a slight sting in their pride to apply this design to iOS 9.

Farahi imagines rounded icons as well as folders, and we must admit it’s a refreshing look for Apple’s mobile operating system. Even the folders are rounded, and if you look carefully, he even threw in an icon that says OvalPicture. We looked in the App Store for an app bearing that name but we couldn’t find it. It’s either for this concept only, or a work in progress over at OvalPicture.

The concept retains the dock at the bottom, albeit with a darker theme. The dock is consistent with the rest of the concept, as it too has rounded sides. All in all, the mockup not only looks pretty, it’s also plausible and doable.

We’d be curious to see how Farahi and his designer friends envision the rest of the operating system along these rounded lines, including the Settings menu, various stock apps that ship with the system, and why not even some marketing materials to go with them. Just to make the concept complete. Who knows, maybe it’ll even rub off on Jony Ive & friends.